Cathedral Choir In Fine Voice With Variety Of Musical Moods

MUSIC REVIEW

April 10, 1989|By Steven Brown, SENTINEL MUSIC CRITIC

The Orlando visit of the Choir of Salisbury Cathedral was an Anglophile's delight. The visit not only offered the chance to sample that ultra-English phenomenon, the choir of men and boys, it also included music by some composers who don't often turn up over here in the colonies.

From Victorian times there were melodious scores by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, descendant of religious leader John Wesley, and Charles Villiers Stanford, mentor of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Tangier music by Kenneth Leighton and Gerald Finzi represented more modern times. And the program did have some more familiar names: the Elizabethan era's William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, as well as Germany's Heinrich Schuetz.

The Salisbury group handled it all with great polish on Friday at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke. Purity of tone is the main advantage that well-trained boys have over women - at least in music that doesn't demand juicy, plush sound - and Salisbury's contingent of boys had that in spades. Their singing was clear and true, untainted by that steam-whistle edginess that boys' voices often have when they aren't harnessed. The men, mellow and light, blended with them handily.

In a spot or two, odd as it sounds, the men couldn't quite hold their own: While they had

the advantage of maturity, the boys had the advantage of numbers, by about two to one. But by and large the choir's 25 members were a poised and well-matched unit.

And even with all that purity and mellowness, they adapted vividly to music of different moods. Even the airy Elizabethan counterpoint of Weelkes and Byrd got more than one kind of treatment. For the festive energy of Weelkes' ''Alleluia'' and ''Hosanna,'' their singing was bright and incisive; they eased up for Byrd's ''Vigilate,'' and gave an especially soft handling to the word dormientes, ''sleeping.'' They treated Schuetz's ''Woman, Why Weepest Thou'' to some of the same caresses.

When the group came to modern-day scores, it was undaunted by the unbridled vigor of Leighton and Finzi. The clear tone and dead-on intonation that made the Elizabethan pieces so transparent also put over the 20th-century harmonies in all their brilliance; the precision that made for lively Byrd paid off even more in the perky rhythms of Leighton's ''Gloria.'' And when Leighton unfurled a big tune in the same piece, the group responded with some of the sleekest singing of the night.

In Stanford's ''Coelos Ascendit Hodie'' the choir split into two contingents, one on each side of the cathedral; director Richard Seal saw that they dovetailed smoothly as they traded their broadly lyrical snippets. The group brought the same poise to a pair of smaller double-chorus pieces by the 17th century's Peter Philips, an Englishman by birth who spent most of his life on the continent.

The evening's finale, Wesley's ''Ascribe Unto the Lord,'' could have been written by Felix Mendelssohn: The winsomeness of the melodies, the lean energy of the agitated spots and directness of the harmonies all bore Mendelssohn's stamp. The singers gave it a very Mendelssohnian elegance, too, especially in their deft molding of the tunes. And the boys' purity of sound worked to angelic effect in a couple of their entrances on high.

Richard Halls was clever in wielding the organ's many colors without drowning out the choir. And he gave the evening a welcome bit of French splashiness with his virtuoso handling of the finale of Louis Vierne's first organ symphony.